


Dreaming in Darkness

by lilbluednacer



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Freeform, Justice for Caramel, episode tag 4.12, exploring trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:34:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22594126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilbluednacer/pseuds/lilbluednacer
Summary: Betty can’t stop. She won’t stop. Not until she’s untangled every thread of this mystery, taken it apart and put it back together.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 17
Kudos: 24
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	Dreaming in Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Clearly I’m not over the whole ‘Betty’s dad made her kill her childhood cat’ thing.

Once upon a time, in a small, quaint town, lived a family. A nice, normal family, with two towheaded daughters and a cat. They were beautiful, and good, and happy.

For a time, anyway.

Don’t forget, after all - fairy tales (real ones, not the glossed over Disney versions) don’t have happy endings.

*

Betty doesn’t know when it started, when the darkness inside her wound itself around her heart, the base of her spine, hooked into her nervous system and her brain cells.

How far back does she have to go, how many family traumas does she have to retrace, to get to the root of the root of it all? 

Did it begin when Jason Blossom died? When she gave Archie her heart and he didn’t want it? When the Lodges moved to town? When Polly had her breakdown? The first time Betty dug her fingernails into her palms hard enough to draw blood?

No. 

No, it started earlier than that. So early that it’s easy to forget it ever happened, easy to pretend it was just a bad dream, a made up story, fiction. Something to repress, bury way deep down. If she doesn’t remember it, does it even count? 

You can tear off the leaves of a poisonous plant but to get rid of it for good it must be dug out by the roots.

And deep down, Betty knows this. Knows that none of this started with her sister, or Jason, or even when her father put on a mask the first time.

It started with a cat.

*

So surreal that it doesn’t seem like it actually happened, even in her memories. When she thinks about it, really thinks, it plays out more like a home movie than a memory, the colors soft at the edges, muted sounds.

The cat did not make a sound. Of this she is almost sure. Cats are predators, they aren’t made to show pain. That poor cat, named after a candy because they were children and children deserve pets with sweet childish names: snowball, honey, coconut.

Caramel.

The rock, though. The rock definitely made a sound.

*

She should be angry, Betty thinks, standing up from the bench when her mother comes out of the principal’s office. She didn’t do anything, she doesn’t deserve to be suspended, to have her title of Editor-In-Chief of the Blue and Gold taken away. It isn’t fair.

Nothing is ever fair, it feels like.

But she isn’t angry. She’s determined, burning with some internal desire to _do something_. She’s become the worst of detectives, the ones who let their lives fall apart in pursuit of a case, get themselves addicted to danger and adrenaline. 

But she doesn’t care. She needs this, it gives her purpose. If she can solve a murder, if she can restore a shred of justice to the world, then -

Then maybe the darkness inside her won’t matter as much. Maybe this will be enough to make it quiet.

*

She lets her mother help.

There’s no one else here (Jughead is away at Stonewall, Veronica in New York for her Barnard interview, Kevin is distracted, Archie might as well be on another planet, and Cheryl is, well, Cheryl) so she lets her mother help her. 

She gets this from her, Betty knows. That itch, that physical desire to solve a puzzle, the inability to rest until the story comes into focus, until all the pieces have been put together in a coherent narrative.

She is her father’s daughter, but she’s her mother’s daughter too.

It is a special kind of burden, Betty is realizing, to be loved the most.

*

She fantasizes about killing Bret sometimes.

Just the way his name is misspelled, the unbelievable pretension of that missing _T_ is enough to make her body flood with rage.

She thinks about poison in his drink, razor blades in his pillowcase. All the ways she could make him suffer. All the way he deserves to suffer.

She does not vocalize this, not even to Jughead. 

It’s not that she’s ashamed of her hate, if anyone deserves the wrath of the female population rained down on their head, it’s Bret.

She doesn’t talk about it because she knows who she’ll sound like if she does, if she goes on a rant about justice and evil and making the world a place where people like that don’t exist.

She’ll sound like _him_.

*

Did the cat know, in the moment Betty lifted the rock, what was going to happen? Did it care? How much can a feline be aware of human intention, anyway? 

It was hurting. Her pet was hurting and she wanted to make it better.

She thought she was helping. She was told she was helping. She was a child, she wanted to be good, and being good meant doing what Daddy said.

She was a child.

Parents are supposed to love their children. Is that what her father thought he was showing her, by making her do that? Love?

Ridiculous. 

What did her father tell her mother, later, about what happened? What story did he spin her, what phantom did he invent to blame for Caramel’s untimely demise?

Maybe he told her he did it himself. Framed it as carrying out justice. Maybe it even sounded kind, the way he said it. Putting a poor animal out of its misery, doing the hard thing, the right thing. 

He was only doing his job, after all. Fathers are supposed to watch out for their children, teach them right from wrong, aren’t they?

What was Betty supposed to learn from that, anyway? That anything can be presented as justice if you twist the facts enough? That cruelty can be soft spoken? That even little girls aren’t precious enough to be protected from that ultimate truth?

Everything dies. Good or bad or somewhere in between, death comes for the virtuous and the villainous alike.

The cat. Jason. Fred Andrews. 

Her father.

*

Jughead is going to Yale.

Her boyfriend, the son of a gang leader, the kid from the trailer park, a boy who kissed her lips and her palms and whispers holy words into her chest when he’s coming inside her, is going to college.

And Betty isn’t.

She knows it’s not all over, that just because he got into Yale and she didn’t doesn’t mean college isn’t happening for her. 

It’s not fair, a slimy selfish part of her thinks. She earned Yale, she worked for it, it was supposed to be hers and now it’s just another dream her father killed.

It’s not that Jug doesn’t deserve it. He’s worked hard, he’s been through so much. He’s a writer, a wonderful writer, the world deserves to hear his words, his stories, his perspective. 

But… what about her? What about the girl who was supposed to grow up beautiful and strong and successful? She was going to achieve things, she was going to change the world, shine a light on the darkness and slay villains with the stroke of her pen.

And now here she is, in her mother's house, watching a videotape of a spoiled, scheming girl lie about having an affair with her teacher.

Betty is so tired of liars. 

But she isn’t tired of solving cases. She has a mind that can’t let go, that fixates on details, she is her mother’s daughter and she knows a story when she sees one.

She can’t stop. She won’t stop. Not until she’s untangled every thread of this mystery, taken it apart and put it back together. 

It’s not like she has anything better to do anyway.

*

It comes to her sometimes, in those shifting moments of consciousness between dreaming and awakening:

The sound of a rock crashing into bone.

But by the time she’s all the way awake she can hardly remember it. Like it was just a dream.


End file.
